Loe raamatut: «One Night: Exotic Fantasies: One Night in Paradise / Pirate Tycoon, Forbidden Baby / Prince Nadir's Secret Heir»

CHAPTER ONE

CLARA Davis looked at the uneaten cake, still as pristine and pink as the bride had demanded, sitting on its pedestal. A very precarious pedestal that had taken a whole lot of skill to balance and get set up. Not to mention have delivered to the coast-side hotel that sat twenty miles away from her San Francisco kitchen.

Everything would have been perfect. The cake, the setting, the groom, well, he was beyond perfect, as usual. And everyone who had been invited had come.

There had been one key person missing, though. The bride had decided to skip the event. And without her, it made it sort of tricky to continue.

Clara eyed the cake and considered taking a slice for herself. She’d worked hard on it. No sense letting it go to waste.

She sighed. The cake wouldn’t make the knot in her stomach go away. It wouldn’t ease any of the sadness she felt. Nothing had been able to shake that feeling, not since the groom, who was now officially jilted, had announced the engagement in the first place.

Though, ironically, watching him get stood up at the altar hadn’t made her feel any better. But how could it? She didn’t like seeing Zack hurt. He was her business partner—more than that, he was her best friend. And also, yeah, the man who kept her awake some nights with the kinds of fantasies that did not bear rehashing in the light of day.

But secret fantasies aside, she hadn’t really wanted the wedding to fall apart. Well, not this close to the actual ceremony. Or maybe she had wanted it. Maybe a small part of her had hoped this would be the outcome.

Maybe that was why she’d agreed to bake the cake. To stand by and watch Zack bind himself to another woman for the rest of his life. There wasn’t really another sane reason for it.

She blew out a breath and walked out of the kitchen and into the massive, empty reception hall. Her heart hit hard against her breastbone when she saw Zack Parsons, coffee mogul, business genius and abandoned groom, standing near the window, looking out at the beach, the sun casting an orange glow on his face and bleeding onto the pristine white of his tuxedo shirt.

He looked different, for just a moment. Leaner. Harder than she was used to seeing him. His tie was draped over his shoulders, his jacket a black puddle by his feet. He was leaning against the window, bracing himself on his forearm.

It shouldn’t really shock her that after being left at the altar he looked stronger in a strange way.

“Hey,” she said, her voice sounding too loud. Stupid in the empty room.

He turned, his gray eyes locking with hers, and she stopped breathing for a moment. He truly was the most beautiful man on the planet. Seven years of working with him on a daily basis should have taken some of the impact away. And some days she was able to ignore it, or at least sublimate it. But then there were other days when it hit her with the force of ten tons of bricks.

Today was one of those days.

“What kind of cake did I buy, Clara?” he asked, pushing off from the window and stuffing his hand into his pocket.

She forced herself to breathe. “The bottom tier was vanilla, with raspberry filling, per Hannah’s instructions. And there was pink fondant. Which I hand-painted, by the way. But the vanilla cake in the middle was soaked in bourbon and honey. And not a single walnut on the whole cake. Because I know what you like.”

“Good. Have someone wrap up the middle tier and send it to my house. And they can send Hannah her tier, too.”

“You don’t have to do that. You can throw it out.”

“It’s edible. Why would I throw it out?”

“Uh … because it was your wedding cake. For a wedding that didn’t happen. For most people it might … take the sweet out of it.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Cake is cake.”

She put her hand on her hip and affected a haughty expression, hoping to force a slight smile. “My cake is more than mere cake, but I get your point.”

“We’ve made a fortune off your cakes, I’m aware of how spectacular they are.”

“I know. But I can make a new cake. I can make a cake that says Condolences on Your Canceled Nuptials. We could put a man on top of it sitting in a recliner, watching sports on his flat-screen television, with no bride in sight.”

The corner of his mouth lifted slightly and she felt a small bubbly sensation in her chest. As though a weight had just been removed.

“That won’t be necessary.”

“That could be a new thing we offer in the shops, Zack,” she said, knowing business was his favorite topic, aborted wedding or no. “Little cupcakes for sad occasions.”

“I’m not all that sad.”

“You aren’t?”

“I’m not heartbroken, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Clara frowned. “But you got left at the altar. Public humiliation is … well, it’s never fun. I had something like that happen in high school when I got stood up by my date at a dance. People pointed and laughed. I was humiliated. It was all very Carrie. Without the pig’s blood or the mass murder.”

“Not the highlight of my life, Clara, I’ll admit.” He swallowed. “Not the lowest point, either. I would have preferred for her to leave me before I was standing at the altar, with the preacher, in a tux, in front of nearly a thousand people, but I’m not exactly devastated.”

“That’s … well, that’s good.” Except it was sort of scary to know that he could be abandoned just before taking his vows and respond to it with an eerie calm. She reacted more strongly to a recipe that didn’t pan out the way she wanted it to.

But then, Zack was always the one with the zenlike composure. When they’d first met, over a cupcake of all things, she’d been impressed by that right away. That and his beautiful eyes, but that was a different story.

She’d been working at a small bakery in the Mission District in San Francisco, and he’d been scoping out a new location for his local chain of coffee shops. He’d bought one of her peanut-butter-banana cupcakes, her experiment du jour. His reaction, like all of Zack’s reactions, hadn’t been overly demonstrative. But there had been a glint in his eye, a hint of that hard steel that lay just beneath the outer calm.

And he’d come back the next day, and the next. She’d never entertained, not for a moment, the idea that he’d been coming in to see her. It had been all about the cupcakes.

And then he’d offered her twice the money to come and work in his flagship shop, making the treats of her choice in his gorgeous, state-of-the-art kitchen. It had been the start of everything for her. At eighteen it had been a major break, and had allowed her to get out of her parents’ house, something she’d been desperate to do.

In the years since, it had been a whole lot more than that.

Roasted’s ten thousandth location had just opened, their first in Japan, and it was being hailed a massive success. Conceptualizing the treats for that shop had been a fun challenge, just like every new international location had been.

She and Zack hadn’t had a life since Roasted had really started to take off, nothing that went beyond coffee and confections, anyway. Of course, Zack was the backbone of the company, the man who got it done, the man who had seen it become a worldwide phenomenon.

They had drinks, coffee beans and mass-produced versions of her cupcakes and other goodies in all the major grocery chains in the U.S. Roasted was a household name. Because Zack was willing to sacrifice everything in his personal life to see it happen.

Hannah had been his only major concession to having a personal life, and that relationship had only started in the past year. And now Zack had lost her.

But he wasn’t devastated. Apparently. She was probably more devastated than he was. Again, cake related.

“I didn’t love her,” he said.

Clara blinked. “You didn’t … love her?”

“I cared about her. She was going to make a perfectly acceptable wife. But it wasn’t like I was passionately head over heels for her or anything.”

“Then why … why were you marrying her?”

“Because it was time for me to get married. I’m thirty. Roasted has achieved the level of success I was hoping for, and there comes a point where it’s the logical step. I reached that point, Hannah had, too.”

“Apparently she hadn’t.”

He gave her a hard glare. “Apparently.”

“Do you know why? Have you talked to her?”

“She can come and talk to me when she’s ready.”

Zack would have laughed at the expression on Clara’s face if he’d found anything remotely funny about the situation. The headlines would be unkind, and with so many media-hungry witnesses to the event, mostly on the absent bride’s side, there would be plenty of people salivating to get their name in print by offering their version of the wedding of the century that wasn’t.

Clara was too soft. Her brown eyes were all dewy looking, as though she were ready to cry on his behalf, her petite hands clasped in front of her, her shoulders slumped. She was more dressed up than he was used to seeing her. Her lush, and no he wasn’t blind so of course he’d noticed, curves complemented, though not really displayed, by a dress that could only be characterized as nice, if a bit matronly.

She did that, dressed much older than she needed to, her thick auburn hair always pulled back into a low bun. Because she had to have her hair up to bake, and it had become a habit. But sometimes he wished she’d just let her hair down. And, because he was a man, sometimes he wished she wouldn’t go to so much trouble to conceal her curves, either.

Although, in reality, her style of dress suited him. They worked together every day, and he had no business having an opinion on her physical appearance. His interest was purely for aesthetic purposes. Like opting for a room with a nice view.

That aside, Clara was all emotion and big hand gestures. There was nothing contained about her.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“I know. I believe you,” she said.

“No, you don’t. Or you don’t want to believe me because your more romantic sensibilities can’t handle the fact that my heart isn’t broken.”

“Well, you ought to love the person you’re going to marry, Zack.”

“Why? Give me a good reason why. So that I could be more broken up about today? So that I could be more suitably wounded if she had shown up, and we had said our vows, when ten years on the marriage fell on the wrong side of the divorce statistics? I don’t see the point in that.”

“Well, I don’t see the point at all.”

“And I didn’t ask.”

“You never do.”

“The secret to my success.” His tone came out a bit harsher than he intended and Clara’s expression reflected it. “You’ll survive this,” he said drily. “Breaking up is hard to do.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be. I’m not so breakable. Tell me, any big word on the Japan location go up online while I was busy getting my photo taken?”

“All good. Some of the pictures I’ve been seeing are showing that it’s absolutely slammed. And everything seems to be going over huge.”

“Good. That means the likelihood of expanding further there is good.” He sat down in one of the vacant, linen-covered chairs. They had pink bows. Also Hannah’s choice. He put his hands on the tabletop, moving his mind away from the fiasco of a wedding day and getting it back on business. “How are things going with our designer cupcakes?”

“Um … well, I was pretty busy getting the wedding cake together.” Clara felt like her head was spinning from the abrupt subject change.

Zack was in full business mode, sitting at the trussed up wedding-party table like it was the pared-down bamboo desk he had in his office at Roasted’s corporate headquarters.

“And?”

“I have a few ideas. But these are pretty labor-intensive recipes and they really aren’t practical for the retail line, or even for most of the stores.”

“Cupcakes are labor intensive?”

She shot him a deadly look. “Why don’t you try baking a simple batch and tell me how it goes?”

“No, thanks. I stick to my strengths, and none of them happen to involve baking.”

“Then trust me, they’re labor intensive.”

“That’s fine. My goal is to start doing a few boutique-style shops in some more affluent areas. We’ll have bigger kitchens so that we’ll have the capability to do more on-site baking.”

“That could work. We’ll have to have a more highly trained staff.”

“That’s fine. I’m talking about a few locations in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, that sort of thing. It will be more like the flagship store. A bit more personalized.”

“I really like the idea, not that you’d care if I didn’t.”

“I am the boss.”

“I know. I’m just the Vice President of Confections,” she said, bringing up a joke they’d started in the early days of the company.

A smile touched his lips again and her heart expanded. “A big job.”

“It is,” she said. “And you don’t pay me enough.”

“Yes, I do.”

She gave him a look. One she knew was less than scary, but she tried. “Anyway, go on.”

“I had made an appointment to speak to a man who owns a large portion of farmland in Thailand. Small clusters of coffee and tea. All of his plants receive a very high level of care and that’s making for extremely good quality roasts and brews. My goal is to set up a deal with him so we can get some limited-editions blends. We’ll sell them in select locations, and have them available for order online.”

Her mind skipped over all the details he’d just laid out, latching on to just one thing. “Weren’t you going to Thailand on your honeymoon?”

“That was the plan.”

Clara couldn’t stop her mouth from dropping open. “You were going to do business on your honeymoon?”

“Hannah had some work to do, as well. Time doesn’t stop just because you get married.”

“No wonder she left you at the altar.” She regretted the words the moment they left her mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“You did, and that’s fine. Unlike you, Hannah had no romantic illusions, you can trust me on that. Her reasons for not showing up today may very well have had something to do with a Wall Street crisis. There’s actually a good chance she’s at her apartment, in her wedding gown, screaming obscenities at her computer screen watching the cost of grain go down.”

She had to concede that the scenario was almost plausible. Hannah was all icy cool composure, and generally nice and polite, until someone crossed her in the corporate world. Clara had overheard the other woman’s phone conversations become seriously cutthroat in tense business situations. Threats of removal of tender body parts had crossed her lips without hesitation.

She admired her for it. For the the intense way she went after what she wanted. She’d done it with Zack. It had been sort of awe inspiring to watch. Mostly it had been awe-inspiringly depressing. Because Clara wasn’t cutthroat, or intense. And she hadn’t been brave enough to pursue what she really wanted. She’d never been brave enough to pursue Zack.

“I doubt that’s what happened,” Clara said, even though she couldn’t be certain.

“There was a reason I asked how the designer-cupcake thing was going.”

“Oh.” Back to business.

“I was trying to make sure you didn’t feel swamped by the amount of work you have to do.”

“No. Creating recipes is the best part of my job. I’ve been having fun with this one. I’ve actually done most of the experimental baking and tasting with our panel, and I have a few standout favorites, plus some that need to be improved. And then I’ll have to narrow down the selection, because it just won’t be feasible to have too many different kinds on the menu at once.”

“So that was the long, detailed version of you telling me you aren’t too busy at the moment?”

She shot him a deadly look. Jilted or not, he didn’t need to be a jerk. “No, I’m not too busy.”

“Good, because everything was set for me to head to Chiang Mai tonight.”

“And you need me to make sure everything is running smoothly at corporate?” That wasn’t usually the role she fulfilled. She wasn’t an administrator, not even close.

“No, I want you to get packed, because you’re coming with me.”

Her stomach honestly felt like it plummeted, squeezing as it made its way down into her toes. “You’re not serious. You’re not actually asking me to come on your honeymoon with you?”

“The trip is booked. I have appointments made. I’m not canceling the honeymoon just because my bride neglected to show up.” He looked at her, like he had thousands of times, but this time felt … It felt different. The inspection seemed closer somehow, his gray eyes more assessing, more intimate. She swallowed hard and tried to ignore the fact that her heart seemed to be trying to claw its way out of her chest. “I think you’ll make a more than fitting replacement.”